on not killing ourselves with our thoughts

Every thought is accompanied by emotion. Every emotion produces physiological changes. These changes stress the body. The body knows no difference between the images you create with your thoughts and "reality." For example, an imagined poisonous snake produces the same alarm reactions within the body as the presence of a real snake. You can sicken and kill yourself with your thoughts. "As you think, so you are."

Practices have been developed for moving beyond thought. Here is the simplest one I know. Sit in a quiet place and put your attention on your breathing. When your attention is captured by a thought, bring your attention back to your breathing. That's it. Over time, you will be able to step outside of any chain of thought. You can simply be here. Breathing.

Now there is room for Awareness. A whole new world opens.

thoughts from reading henry corbin in the early a.m.

"In the beginning was the Word." The Word in Its ruminations eventually gave rise to the concept of self-doubt. Every concept is experienced immediately and fully. Self-doubt produces anger; self-doubt and anger co-arise. The Word now includes both Light and Dark. No opposition here. Inclusion. The self-doubt and the emotions that arise with it, the Dark of the Word, are fed back into the Light of the Word. Dark becomes Light and Light becomes Dark and the two are not at war but eternally merge into each other. Dark is not evil. Dark is a momentum within the Word allowing creative and continuous transformation.

We humans have much to learn from this. Our self-doubt and the anger that arises from our doubting ourselves lead us to war. War against ourselves. War against each other. Were we to follow the example of the Word, we would see the darkness of self-doubt as an ally allowing our own creative and continuous transformation. Rather than making war, we would allow the continuous flow of Light into Dark and Dark into Light to transform and open our Heart.

a person whose focus

A person whose focus is on the world of appearance rather than upon deeper reality rides roughshod over the tender toughness of the heart of nature, sells the soul of the earth for material gain and pleasure. Hungry ghosts with vast mouths, narrow constricted throats, and forever unsatisfied and bloated bellies. We celebrate them as successes. We are them.

my proof to me of God's existence which will not be accepted by anyone caught in Aristotelian logic nor of an argumentative nature but will be understood fully and completely by the Fedele d'Amore

How can the Object of such Love not exist?

transcendence of humanimal

Our job, as humanimals, is to open to a higher forming, as caterpillar opens to butterfly, as plant opens to flower. If we do not, we are seed fallen on barren ground. We die without giving anything back. There is no return on this investment.

Each of us has a personal God. We may not think of it in those terms but there is something above all else we worship in our lives. The greater the radiance of our God, the greater our radiance. The more smudgy our God, the more smudgy we are. You can tell a person's God by the radiance of their being. We become the God we serve.

No more brilliant radiance exists than the Source of our being. When we open in love to the Source of our being, we transcend humanimal. A circuit is completed and that love reverberates forever.

capacity

In the spiritual realm, the realm of the psyche, we can only know what we have the capacity, the capaciousness, to know. We cannot comprehend what falls outside our capacity.

How do we increase our capacity, our ability to see the presently unseen? By continually knocking on the door of the bounds of our walls. "Knock, and it shall be opened." But not with one or two feeble knocks followed by a sigh and the words: "I tried. God knows, I tried." Tried brings only trials.

That-Which-Breathes-Us knows the difference between true knocking and just messing around. "God is not mocked." Sin-cere means "with heart" or "from the heart." When we sincerely knock through our asking, our reading, our listening, our moment-by-moment relations with all around us, by the very way we walk, talk, and eat our food, walls will drop away, our capaciousness of consciousness will expand.

This opening and expansion is an extension of Grace. One has to be graceful, grace full, to receive Grace. Knocking at the door is graceful action and when the door opens, Grace is on the other side.

three realms

Three realms: (1) the humanimal realm, (2) the inner or esoteric realm, (3) the unending depths of the inner; the esoteric of the esoteric.

The humanimal realm contains the potential for the birth of humans. Much of the socio-political world is inhabited by and created by humanimals. This is the world of turmoil, the cauldron out of which true humans can be born. Humanimals know little or nothing of the esoteric realm and are motivated by their genitalia, their mouths, and a false image of themselves. We are all humanimals until born into the inner realm. We stop attending to our advantage in the exoteric and open as pilgrims of the esoteric.

The inner or esoteric realm is the realm of spirit, of spiritual intelligence and awareness. When we open in this realm, we become human, no longer humanimals. We receive guidance, knowledge, and understanding. We belong to a vast community of those who have gone before us and those yet to come. We are at home while on an unending journey, a journey of boundless compassion and understanding.

The realm of the esoteric of the esoteric, the inner depths, is the Wellspring from which all knowledge, wisdom, and compassion arise. As we turn away from the humanimal, open to our humanness, we begin to live in the realm of the Angelic. We do not know what this means until we live here.

The three realms. We choose the realm in which we live, in which we cast our fortune, our life. We find that not only do we choose, we are chosen. Love is mutual.

a pome: 2:35 a.m. on a fine november morning

S/he sat within the womb of social custom
fearful of making a move lest s/he tumble
into unknown realms.

Grateful when social custom allowed
revolt against social custom
sensing wild free-flowing freedom
while remaining within the womb,
the womb of social custom.

Who dares to leap into life,
naked babe wielding sword and rose?

duende

You want life presented to you? A crystal plate of petit-fours to munch in cute little crumbless nibbles? Here! I toss it from you!

I see your mouth! A gaping hole of fangs feeding on life's wound. This mouth of wounding tells all, yawns open, revealing insatiable depth.

The narrow way is made a broad highway. No path exists now, no path at all. No path but the rich dark blood gushing from each pounding of the heart. This can be trusted! This and only this! This life arising from fierce darkness, of mystery, of being.

vehicles

Ego is a way of maneuvering in the material world. Our learned ways of manipulating the material world (consolidated into what we call ego) are of no value in maneuvering in the spiritual world. A different vehicle is needed.

The vehicle for maneuvering in the spiritual world possesses characteristics opposite to the vehicle for maneuvering in the material world. Where the ego vehicle is blaming, judgmental, clinging, suspicious, desirous, unsatisfied, opportunistic, greedy, self-admiring, self-doubting, ambitious, masturbatory, violent, contemptuous, and stuporous, the vehicle for maneuvering in the spiritual world is mindful, open, loving, acceptant, calm, surrendering, forgiving, contemplative, energizing, engaging, diamond sharp, relentless, present, aware, quiet, and knows no bounds.

Two very different vehicles. The consolidated ego and the radiant sphere. We are all wounded. The ego is the protective scab over our wound. The radiant sphere is the opening of our wounding to the healing of the Wellspring, the Source which births and breathes us. Driving our ego vehicle, we go nowhere at all. As a radiant sphere, we are always already everywhere.

the cosmic ultradian rhythm

Every hour and a half we fall into the depths of matter. Every hour and a half we open into the transcendence of spirit. This is called the Ultradian Rhythm -- a physiological or biochemical rhythm that comes with being a human. We sink and we rise in a 90 minute cycle.

What is true for an individual also has its counterpart in the cosmic cycle. "As above, so below." "As the macrocosm, so the microcosm." We have reached the end of an age of sinking (the Kali Yuga it is called by some) and are opening to an age of strong lifeforce and trance-end-ence.

interflow

"...(N)ot only do we create a picture of the world, but the picture retroactively changes us" (Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 361-362). As I have said before, whatever we attend to, we become. The implications of this are enormous.

Meister Eckhart states it boldly: "We are entirely transformed into God and changed into Him." Attending to the Radiance of our Source changes us into that Radiance. Attending to the denseness of matter changes us into that denseness. Attending to the Radiance of our Source while engaging life fully as a human transforms the world.

inclusion

In early personhood (age 12 and on), I began learning the art of disappearing so that others could appear. Later, as a practicing psychologist, this was essential.

Rather than being an evangelist of my own consciousness state, looking for as many converts as possible, turning out little clones of George ("if you will only be like me, your psychospiritual problems will disappear"), I condensed into a centering point, thus allowing full play to the other's expression of their psychic state. This disappearance while being fully present is called listening.

Without losing one's own center, one is "converted" to another person's way of thinking. This is true not only for the consciousness states of individuals, but also for the larger more inclusive consciousness states known as world views or religions or cultures and their subcultures. This is why I am a Christian Taoist Pagan Agnostic Buddhist Islamic Hindu Atheist Wakan Tankan Scientist...

As the world continues to shrink and we are increasingly tossed into each other's laps, it is important to be converted to each other's way of seeing without losing our own view. We center within our own being while opening to the views of others.

No longer are we colonialists looking to colonize the world with our superiority, we are neighbors. Neighbors opening and listening and speaking when it is our turn. This is called consideration -- con-side-ration (sitting side by side). We ride this bus together.

laughter and delight

you have such diverse life experience. what do you think led you to the peaceful spot you are now? (as opposed to other more violent, hard, judgmental spots)

An excellent neighbor friend posed that question in her response to a Geezer blog post where I spoke of sitting in the sun on a geezer bench downtown amusing myself by running through the various hand strikes for attacking a person's body. I responded: Laughter and Delight.

True, but what prompts these twin energies, this double helix spiraling, this interwoven ascendency of flame and light that I feel at my core, that I am? It's certainly not little Georgie though he does his part in staying open to this indwelling flowthrough of cosmic energies.

When we are young, we choose our role models, consciously or unconsciously. And maybe they also choose us because we have some kind of raw material that suits, like a cookie dough that is primarily suited for only one kind of cookie. The dough boy or dough girl chooses the cookie type s/he will become and the cookie type also calls the dough into shaping and firing. I chose Jesus, Hopalong Cassidy, Michael the Archangel, and Gene Autry.

I saw early on, as a kid, that I had to leave my heart open no matter how much it got hurt. I also saw that to lie down in the road and let others leave their tire tracks across your face was no good. One had to have an open heart while standing up to whatever came. Voila! Warrior.

Now I could go into the sociopsychological and cultural influences that shape a person, that shape us all, but that was not "what led me to the peaceful spot" I am now. I was taken and shaken. My awareness was opened dramatically yet lovingly to knowing that I am an embodying of the cosmos, of the Source, of the Wellspring. I was 12. I have written of it elsewhere. That awareness continues to fine tune itself. I look like little Georgie but I have stars in my eyes.

I am peaceful because I trust That-Which-Breathes-Me. As Rumi says, "Whoever brought me here will have to take me home." I know that Whoever. I am a warrior because I have no fear. I am the Source sourcing and so are we all.

Thank you, dear neighbor, for asking the question.

bubble boy and bubble girl

Rather than opening as an unadulterated expression of Mystery, we have introduced a bubble in which we dwell. We call it a self or soul. It is a figleaf of our imagination with which we try to cover ourselves.

It has wrenched itself off from the tree of life. It's such a sap.

The bubble soul self constantly wants to dress its wound. It wants stuff to stuff its hole, that aching void it has created.

It wants adventure. It wants entertainment. It wants drama. It wants turmoil. It wants peace but not that much peace thank you.

It wants to possess other self soul bubbles and bind them close, maybe make a bubble raft in this vast and lonely cosmic ocean it has created through its bubbularity.

It wants to stand alone. It wants somebody else to fix things. It wants. It wants. It wants.

Bubble boy and bubble girl. Where's my pin?

Pop! Holy Shit! What a vast openness!